As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an Information Handling System (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, global communications, etc. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
In some situations, a customer (e.g., a business or an enterprise) may buy various IHS devices (e.g., smart phones, laptops, desktops, servers, etc.) that need to be configured for security or monitoring before they can be deployed or given to the customer's end-users (e.g., the customer's employees, the customer's own customers, etc.). To perform this initial configuration, a customer's IT department may receive each individual IHS device, unbox it, manually configure it, and then ship it to its end-user for deployment. Alternatively, the customer may request that the IHS device's manufacturer put a custom image on the IHS device, or the customer's end-users may themselves receive the IHS device and follow steps to re-image those devices on their own.
In cases where the manufacturer puts a custom image on the IHS device, those imaging operations are performed at the factory. However, when the IHS device is coming from the manufacturer's existing inventory, manipulating each individual IHS device is impractical. Conversely, having employees re-image their IHS devices tends to be problematic logistically and also for security reasons.
An existing approach for addressing the foregoing problems includes having the IHS device initiate a request to the customer's locally deployed provisioning service when the IHS device is first activated. In most cases, an IHS device can use a network connection to be activated out of the box. As the inventor hereof has recognized, however, there is currently no way to pre-provision trust of a customer's provisioning service only for IHS devices that the customer purchases.